#Something in the air 2012 movie
#Something in the air 2012 tv

Is Leslie, a fraud, a self-deceiver, or just a spoilt, wilful girl? During his Italian trip he meets the rich American redhead Leslie (India Salvor Menuez), a student of modern dance who speaks in a flat whisper and moves with a group of hippies who consult I Ching before making their decisions. They denounce a book criticising Mao as the work of a CIA agent, though Gilles, pondering his career as painter, is becoming a trifle sceptical, something signalled by a collection of Orwell's essays in English on his table. They make the movies, Christine does the cooking and the heavy lifting. He takes up with the deeply serious Christine (Lola Créton), who's joined a slightly older moviemaking collective, aiming to celebrate and record the working class, whom they worship and to whom they consider themselves inferior. Gilles breaks up with his beautiful girlfriend Laure Carole Combes), who introduces him to Gregory Corso and the Beat poets we know from her passionate detachment that she's on the way to something dangerous or glorious. School breaks up for the summer with the possibility of criminal charges being brought against Gilles and his friend and fellow artist Alain (Félix Armand) when they head off for the summer vacation, helping to spread the revolution into Italy. One carefully prepared guerrilla attack on the school results in a violent clash with security guards followed by an attack on the guards themselves as class enemies defending the regime. He takes part in angry, highly articulate, hair-splitting debates and violent demonstrations, hands out leaflets, sprays slogans on walls. For some of them he writes and contributes illustrations. First a political science teacher regales Gilles's class with a passage from Blaise Pascal that ends: 'Between us and heaven and hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.' Then we see Gilles reading the numerous left-wing journals produced by competing Maoists, anarchists, Trotskyists, situationists and combinations of all of these. Assayas establishes his restless world with vivid dispatch. The central character and, we assume, Assayas's cinematic alter ego, is Gilles (Clément Métayer), a handsome 17-year-old in his last year at a suburban Paris lycée and on his way to art school. But the spirit of revolution is, as the British title tells us, still in the air. The film opens in 1971 and as its French title suggests, May's blissful dawn of sudden change is over. The cinema and theatre have looked back on those times in different ways: ambiguously by Trevor Griffiths in his 1973 National Theatre play The Party and David Mercer in his RSC play After Haggerty mockingly by Louis Malle (one of the filmmakers who helped close down the 1968 Cannes festival) in his 1990 film Milou en mai nostalgically by Bernardo Bertolucci in The Dreamers in a sad, cynical or despairing mode by a variety of American movies.Īssayas turns a sympathetic, understanding eye on his earlier self and his contemporaries, but he neither invites us to take them at their own evaluation nor forbids us to smile at their pretensions and deep seriousness. It's a semi-autobiographical picture about the French generation that were just reaching their teens in 1968 when the explosive, revolutionary événements took place that May, shaking the nation, politicising the young and creating ripples that have lasted for decades. What all those films have in common is a quiet, unobtrusive style and a sharp attention to the social and historical context of their characters' lives, and this continues in his involving, moving and honest new picture, Something in the Air (aka Après mai).

#Something in the air 2012 tv

Slightly different are Irma Vep, a cinéaste's celebration of Hong Kong movies and the surreal silent serials of Louis Feuillade, and Carlos, his TV mini-series on the notorious Venezuelan terrorist. Most are concerned with moral problems and social responsibility in a middle-class setting like his Les Destinées sentimentales about a rebellious young man reluctantly taking over the family's prestigious porcelain factory in the 1920s, and Summer Hours, the tale of siblings and their elderly mother gathering to settle the estate of a recently deceased painter.

#Something in the air 2012 movie

The son of a movie director and now in his 50s, Olivier Assayas has built up an interestingly varied body of work as a critic for Cahiers du cinéma, authored several books including a monograph on Ingmar Bergman, and directed over the past 20 years a succession of modest, intelligent films.